


Clay Between the Teeth

by NeverwinterThistle



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Coma, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-14
Updated: 2019-02-14
Packaged: 2019-10-26 05:33:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17739944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeverwinterThistle/pseuds/NeverwinterThistle
Summary: The door is clay.





	Clay Between the Teeth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cher](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cher/gifts).



It’s an obsession.

It exists at the corner of Jon’s eye, like a gritty piece of sand that rubs and rubs and avoids all attempts at removal. He can’t quite make it out; blurred as though by tears, shapeless and unrecognisable. When he squints and tries to focus, it laughs like a dentist’s drill inside his jaw, pushing upwards through his gums.

The other dreams are constant. Jon wanders through them like a commuter on a train, stepping off at every familiar stop, going about his unchanging, quotidian labours. Living the dreams he was given, which he didn’t mean to keep.

The sterile room and arrhythmic, amateur hearts. The screen and the keyboard ( _it hurts_ ). The singing box and sobbing rain, the tunnels and the soil between his teeth and the passenger’s, the hunters, the graveyard, the disappointed woman, the yellow door-

The door.

The door repulses him; he knew where it led, and now he doesn’t, and the _not knowing_ grates at him, but not as much as the fear. He turns away every time it appears. He refuses to look too closely at its yellow wood and tar-black handle. It might offer an escape.

He hopes he’s never desperate enough to take it.

The door, again. The sterile room and bearded man who desperately wants to speak, but has forgotten that the tongue is rooted in the mouth, and not in the apple he brandishes. The door is yellow. The woman spitting up pieces of plastic keyboard, gagging on them; they land with little clatters at her feet, and spell a phrase ( _it hurts_ ). The box is still singing, the darkness still smothers. The woman pities him. The exterminator screams beneath the scurrying. The door is convoluted clay, wet with watery bitterness, and the handle bulges outward, reaching for him-

Jon stops. If he were breathing, he would cease; if his heart had a rhythm, it would skip. And then he blinks, and the door is yellow again, its colour sickening. He runs.

But the door is clay, and it grows clearer at the corner of his eye as he cycles through the dreams. He looks for its slumped, irregular shape in corners, walls, ceilings. Sometimes it turns yellow. Increasingly, it doesn’t. But Jon can see it bulge, the clay writhing like chum in seawater, forming loose and clumsy spirals.

He took its statement, he remembers. He lived its anger, resentment, futility, its claustrophobic confinement in a vessel too small and too mundane to do anything other than starve and suffocate. It asked him if he considered it evil.

 _No,_ he decides as the cycle loops, loops, loops, and the dreams march reliably past like soldiers at parade. _No, I can’t say I do. There are worse things in the world._

The next time the door appears, thrashing clay in the wall of the sterile room, Jon reaches for it. He takes the handle; it’s sharper than it looks. He was expecting that. It cuts him as he tugs it open, and beyond it is-

Nothing.

Just the white wall in the sterile room; the dull beat of disembodied hearts and the bearded man as he smacks his apple against the edge of a bench, trying to extricate his liver from its pulp.

“Damn,” Jon mouths. The words taste strange; he’s forgetting how the throat works. But it gets easier as he goes. “Damn, _damn_. Where the hell did you go?”

And then the door handle digs itself into the fleshy part of his hand between thumb and forefinger, begins to climb his arm. The clay door is melting, settling itself around a wavering scaffold of bone and definitely not bone, and Jon hits the ground hard under its weight.

He’s too winded to scream.

He’s not sure he would anyway.

“Hello,” he gasps through lungs that ache and don’t pump air. Above him, the creature shakes itself like a wet dog, clay folding around a shape with too many joints, and too many bones where the hands should be. It has a face, sometimes. Its expression is not encouraging.

“What did you _do_?” Michael shrieks at him. The echo of its voice carries on, lingering like an afterimage, an after-scream in Jon’s ears. He grabs at those unbearable hands before they can swipe, swearing as the jagged edges tear his palms.

“Stop, would you just listen-”

“Once was simply not enough for you, was it, Archivist? I gave you my statement, and you wanted _more_. You wanted to witness my unmaking, my shrinking, and then force my screaming self into yet another pointless, pathetic vessel-”

“I didn’t- would you just listen to me, I’m trying to explain!”

Michael’s rage flickers, the face replaced by a grinning, grinning skull, by a laughing mask, by a wet and spiralling grimace. “No?” it tells him; under the rage Jon hears a flicker of the old mocking disbelief. “You’ve had your fun, Archivist. And now it’s my turn.”

“ _I didn’t do anything to you_ ,” Jon howls in its temporary face. His palms are wet with blood and clay; he feels radiant with rage. It’s the first emotion he’s experienced in a very long time. He’s surprised by how much he enjoys it. And, contrary to all common sense, he’s not afraid. Perhaps he’s all out of fear. Perhaps there’s nothing Michael could do that is in any way worse than where he is now.

Buoyed by glorious, searing anger, he shouts over the monster. “I am tired of having terrifying, utterly inhuman creatures show up and harass me for things I don’t even know about until they tell me. I am _tired_ of being held accountable for the…the crimes you think Gertrude committed. And, by the way, don’t you find it even the slightest bit hypocritical? You want revenge because she stopped your damn apocalypse, but then you start doing the exact same thing to both the Stranger and the Eye! But somehow I’m the one at fault? I’m sick of it! I am sick of sitting there in, in _pain_ , or _terrified,_ listening to all of you! Why can’t you listen to _me_ for a change?”

He can feel Michael’s limp and bone-filled frame shake with laughter. “Oh, Archivist, what-“

“ _Shut. Up!”_ Jon roars at it.

Sudden silence falls between them. Jon gets the sense that he might have shocked the creature a little; he’s certainly managed to shock himself. In the absence of arguments, or breathing, he can hear the futile gushes of blood from the solitary hearts on the metal desks behind him. The bearded man continues to beat his apple against a sharp edge. He is weeping in blessed silence. He still doesn’t have his liver back.

Michael watches him with two eyes, many eyes, no eyes at all. That mad grin shows through whatever form its face takes, like tissue paper stretched over an animal skull. It doesn’t say anything. It doesn’t hurt him. It doesn’t even laugh.

Eventually, Jon cracks. “Aren’t you going to say anything? Mock me, point out how fragile and easily killed I am, that sort of thing?”

Michael blinks. Or some of it does. “No,” it says. “I was being quiet, as you asked. I think that’s called…politeness.”

“Oh. I mean, yes, it is. Well done.”

“Also,” it says, “I was thinking. And you may have a point, I…have been uncharacteristically single-minded of late. I blame it on Michael. It is not in my nature to _be_ single-minded; my minds would be innumerable, had I any minds at all.”

“Yes, well, I think I’m getting close to losing mine,” Jon says. “So if you manage to find it, you might as well add it to the collection. Not sure I want it back, to be honest with you.”

“I encourage you to be honest with me, Archivist,” Michael says. “Although I won’t be returning the favour. It’s not-”

“In your nature, yes, I know, thank you for repeatedly stating the obvious.”

“It _is_ maddening, isn’t it?” Michael says. It’s gleeful now, hilarity sharp-edged with the lingering traces of its earlier rage. A pendulum that swings unpredictably, and could even now reverse. “Almost as much as being trapped once again. In vessels, in dreams, it hardly matters; I too am tired, Archivist. I am tired of shapes, of corners, of limits. Even in this place, my essence is crushed.”

“So just…leave?” Jon says. “Can’t you just open a door and go?” But he knows the answer without asking; he can’t tell if it’s his power, that unreasonable, unpredictable comprehension, or something a lot more mundane. Maybe he’s just starting to understand how these things work.

“Helen,” he says, and Michael hisses softly.

“Yes.”

“She’s _you_ now.”

“That is one way of describing it.”

“So what does that make you?”

“I don’t know,” Michael says. “I should be gone; the ritual I inadvertently triggered should have split apart this unsuitable body, and tossed my self around like puzzle pieces in a box. When I was remade as Helen, that should have been the end. And yet.”

“Still a piece or two left over in the box,” Jon says.

“Or tucked away in your pocket, perhaps. You stole me, Archivist. In taking my statement, you chipped away at my edges, and claimed some fragment of my essence for yourself. And here I am. Stranded, and still pointless. Smothered. And…obliterated, I suspect, without your continued existence. This is your dream. Your un-life. And you are the necrotic roots that sustain my brittle self.”

 _If you die, I die,_ Jon translates mentally. He’s not surprised to hear it; the suspicion has been building since that drooping clay door first appeared as a blur at the corner of his vision. Since he first realised that there was a statement missing from his collection, and began to look for it.

“Help me,” he says. Pushes himself somewhat upright, or as much as he can manage with Michael’s weightless weight pinning him. His legs will not move; he rises onto his elbows and implores in a way he despises. “Please. There will be a way out of this; if I have the dreams, I’m still the Archivist, and eventually the Eye will need me back at work. I’m getting out somehow. You could help me, we could…cooperate. You could still have your revenge.”

“Or I could kill you,” Michael says. It grins a mouthful of shards, blood between its stained-glass teeth. And then it has a face again. Even then, it grins, nauseating. Jon swallows hard.

“I realise I’m asking for a lot,” he says, “But if you could stop threatening me, I’d be grateful. None of your threats are even particularly original.”

“I disagree.”

“I don’t _care_.”

“Very well, Archivist,” Michael says. “If threats bore you, then I will not threaten. I will simply…promise. I am going to kill you. Not in this moment; not in this dead and undying dream, and not immediately afterwards. Not until the Eye has witnessed its Crown torn into pointless shards and scattered across all the empty places in between, where they will lie for millennia. Not until your master has experienced an unmaking like my own, and is at liberty to wallow in its exquisite comprehension. Not until you have recorded that comprehension for the Eye to watch again, and again. After that, I will kill you. And not before.”

There isn’t really much choice in the matter. Still, it’s more than Jon was expecting.

“Fine,” he rasps. “That’s fair, that’s…fine. I’m not sure what this Crown is, but I suspect it’s just one more disaster I’ll need to avert. Fine. You want revenge, I don’t want apocalypse. That’s promising.”

“It is my promise to you,” Michael says. Abruptly, Jon finds his hands gripping absolutely nothing; its cutting wrists slip from his grasp like water, leaving him tattered and bloody, but without pain. He doesn’t feel pain here. Others do; the pitiful conduits of his dreams, they do. But Jon himself is beyond it.

He holds still as one of Michael’s hands reappears by his face, fast enough that the air seems to shiver around it. There are too many fingers. They bend unbearably. And they are _sharp_ ; one hovers over his mouth, and though the tapered point seems to end several inches from his skin, still Jon feels something digging into his lower lip, too thin to make out, lethally pointed. He thinks again of glass. Of a laugh so sharp it opens windows in the walls of his skull.

Of a smiling invitation to insanity.

He kisses Michael’s smile and tastes capriciousness, erraticism on the tongue that coils around his own, the teeth that tear and the metallic clay that coats his mouth. One of them is laughing. One has a spine like a wound-up spring, that flexes when nails scrape over it. One keeps his eyes open to watch the other’s features melt, multiply, fade and reappear. They move into each other in a fever haze. The promise is sealed in the bloody saliva that smears them both; they lay claim to a bit of each other.

It can’t happen. It does.

Around them, dismembered hearts spurt and twitch like dying insects. The dreams continue.

**Author's Note:**

> *Pitches Clan Denial flag right next to yours.*


End file.
